Whole New Round of Junk gTLDs Coming Down the Pike: 12 Years, Nothing Changed
WEST PALM BEACH, FL – More than a decade ago, the Internet was supposedly about to change forever. ICANN opened the floodgates to hundreds of new generic top-level domains, or gTLDs. Instead of relying primarily on familiar extensions such as .com, .net and .org, businesses would have seemingly endless alternatives: .guru, .agency, .solutions, .club, .online, .technology and hundreds more.
The first new gTLDs were delegated in 2013. ICANN called it the largest expansion of the Domain Name System in history and promoted the program as a way to increase competition, innovation and consumer choice. More than 12 years later, we have had plenty of time to judge the results. Consumers largely didn’t care.
Twelve Years Later, .COM Is Still .COM
New gTLDs certainly attracted registrations, and legitimate businesses operate on them. But they never fundamentally changed consumer behavior. People still expect .com. Businesses still covet good .com domains. Companies still pay substantial amounts to acquire them. As of June 30, 2026, approximately 166.6 million .com domains were registered.
The market has had more than a decade to vote, and it largely kept voting for .com. Yet here we go again. ICANN opened another application round for new gTLDs on April 30, 2026. The application window closed August 12, meaning another collection of new extensions will eventually be making its way onto the Internet. Some will have legitimate uses, particularly branded extensions controlled by large corporations and specialized geographic or community domains.
But another round of generic alternatives? We’ve seen this movie before.
What About .AI?
There is one extension that seems to contradict this argument: .ai. AI domains have exploded. Technology companies want them. Startups use them. Investors speculate on them. Premium .ai domains can command enormous prices. There’s just one problem. .AI isn’t a new gTLD. In fact, it isn’t a generic top-level domain at all.
.ai is the country-code top-level domain for Anguilla, the small British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. It was delegated in 1995, almost two decades before the new-gTLD expansion. Its success has nothing to do with ICANN creating another clever alternative to .com. Anguilla simply happened to own two letters that became extraordinarily valuable.
Artificial intelligence exploded. AI became one of the defining technology trends of our time. Companies suddenly wanted to identify themselves with those two letters, and demand for .ai domains took off. The marketplace created the demand. ICANN didn’t. And that may be the most revealing part of the entire new-domain-extension experiment.
You Can Create an Extension. You Can’t Create Demand.
Nobody had to convince technology companies that “AI” meant something. Nobody had to spend a decade teaching consumers what it represented. The world changed, the letters became valuable, and an obscure country-code extension suddenly became one of the hottest domain extensions on the Internet. Compare that with hundreds of intentionally created new gTLDs that have been available for more than a decade. You can manufacture an extension. You cannot manufacture the public’s desire to use it. That is why .ai isn’t evidence that the new-gTLD concept worked. It’s evidence of the opposite.
The most notable alternative-domain success story of the current Internet era wasn’t created by the new-gTLD program at all. It was a decades-old geographic country code that got extraordinarily lucky when its two letters became synonymous with the biggest technology boom in years.
And Now More Are Coming
ICANN received 1,930 applications during its original 2012 new-gTLD round. Hundreds of new extensions ultimately entered the Internet’s domain-name system. They expanded the namespace. They created businesses for registry operators. They gave domain registrars more inventory to sell. What they didn’t do was knock .com off its throne or fundamentally change the way consumers think about Internet addresses. Twelve years is enough time to know that.
Perhaps this new round will produce some genuinely useful extensions. Branded domains in particular can serve legitimate purposes. But if we’re about to hear once again that the Internet desperately needs another mountain of generic domain extensions because all the good .com names are gone, we’ve heard that argument before. The irony is difficult to miss.
After more than a decade of deliberately creating hundreds of new domain extensions, one of the biggest alternative-extension success stories is .ai – a 31-year-old (1995) country-code domain belonging to a tiny Caribbean island. Sometimes the market has a way of making the decision for us.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a how-to book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several online businesses.
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It’s so refreshing to come across well-written, impactful articles like the ones you take the time to write, John.
After being in trademarks and domaining for 25+ years, I barely still read content posted on Domaining anymore; because most of the articles are just a waste of valuable time and do nothing to provide readers with actionable insights.
You are the rare exception, so keep up the great work.
Thank you, Gene. I really appreciate that, especially coming from someone who has been involved in trademarks and domaining for more than 25 years.
Luckily, I report to no one, so I get to speak my mind. I don’t have advertisers, registries, registrars, or anyone else telling me what I should or shouldn’t say. If I think something in this industry makes sense, I’ll say so. If I think it’s nonsense, I’ll say that too.
After doing this for as long as I have, I’ve found that the most interesting things to write about are usually the things everyone else is thinking but not necessarily saying out loud.
Thanks again for reading and for taking the time to comment. I truly appreciate it.
I think calling the newer gTLD extensions “junk” is pretty dismissive of the organizations and communities that have chosen to make them their home.
Amazon has built its developer community at community.aws. teamLab showcases its art at teamlab.art. Gamescom uses gamescom.global for the world’s largest gaming event. There’s castingcall.club for actors, bond.tech, Canon at global.canon, Cash App at cash.app, and the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center at streicker.nyc. Those certainly don’t strike me as “junk.”
I get it. .com is king in terms of registration numbers, by orders of magnitude, and probably always will be. No argument from me there.
But new gTLDs were never about replacing .com. They were about giving consumers, businesses and communities more choices rather than artificially limiting the namespaces they can choose from. Some will succeed, some won’t. That’s what happens when you give the market a choice.
P.S. I had a production company called Neural Productions whose website is neural.productions. It is an old site that hasnt been updated, but I am working on an overhaul and still use it for email.
I see where you’re coming from, Jeff, and those are some good examples. But I see junk. People buy junk all the time. Some people even collect junk. Call them ‘alternatives’, ‘second-best choices’, ‘creative namespaces’, or ‘almost-as-good’ domains if you prefer. I call them junk. As the old saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
And I’m not saying this as someone who never bought into the alternatives. I’ve invested in plenty of “dot whatevers” myself. When .cars came out, I spent thousands of dollars per domain acquiring several of them, and I even paid the astronomical renewal fees at least once. But eventually I realized they weren’t giving me the advantage that I was hoping for, and I just let them expire. I guess you could say I had to realize over time that they were just junk. I still own plenty of alternative extensions today. So I am still willing to put my own money behind them. Some of them are ‘kind of cool’ but that is probably all they” ever be.
But here we are more than a decade later, and I think the market has given us plenty of time to judge the results. There are absolutely successful examples, including several of the ones you mentioned. But a successful company using an alternative extension doesn’t necessarily make the extension successful.
Amazon can make community.aws work. Cash App can make cash.app work. Canon can make global.canon work. Those are enormous, established brands that could probably build successful websites on just about anything.
That doesn’t mean the average business would be equally well served with the corresponding alternative instead of the .com.
So perhaps “junk” isn’t the most diplomatic word. But as I told Gene in the comment right above yours, fortunately I report to no one, so I get to speak my mind absent of repercussion for the most part And after watching this experiment play out for more than a decade, “junk” is still the word I’ll have to stand by, atleast for now. Maybe that will change over time, but in my original forecast of how long these little gems will take the mature — and that was/is likely 50-100 years. (My original forecast was 50 years, but I think I’m going to extend it to 100.)